The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women by Sally Barr Ebest

O’Hagan began satiriz-
    ing the idealization of marriage. After The Survey published essays regarding
    a wife’s marital obligations, she asked whether the magazine also pro-
    posed reviving the stagecoach; when Vanity Fair attacked feminism for its
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    supposedly negative effects on married life, she skewered the notion with a
    story about Mr. and Mrs. Cave Man; in Harper’s she ridiculed the treatment
    of single women, while in Munsey’s Magazine she poked fun at stereotypi-
    cal romantic depictions of literary heroines. Inadvertently anticipating the
    actions of second-wave feminists, O’Hagan even criticized her peers. Like
    the doctor in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she con-
    sidered Gilman an hysteric;2 like future feminists, she dismissed the next
    generation as “trivial and ill versed in the contributions of their foremoth-
    ers.” Most ironically, after her own marriage late in life, O’Hagan’s work
    (and unfortunately, her sharp wit) dwindled away (Ebest 2005, 116).
    Satire came naturally to Irish American journalists. Ruth McKinney, a
    daughter of the Irish nationalist Marguerite Flynn McKinney, worked her
    way up from the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch to the New York Post in just three
    years. At that point, she became a freelance writer and began contributing
    stories to Harper’s Bazaar ,the New Yorker , and eventually to New Masses , where she took over as editor. Yet these early, serious accomplishments—
    along with her 1938 expose’ of Depression-era factory workers, Industrial
    Valley —were all but forgotten with the publication of her short story col-
    lection, My Sister Eileen (1938), which quickly went through six reprints,
    yielded a sequel, and was turned into musical, a Broadway play, a movie,
    and eventually a sitcom. Unlike the pre-Famine generation, McKinney’s sat-
    ire was not meant to counter anti-Irish slurs; rather, she expressed “amuse-
    ment over the oafi sh attempts of the Irish to Americanize themselves” (Ebest
    2005, 73–75). In this, she refl ected a sense of assimilation characteristic of
    the third stage of postcolonial writing—a “declaration of cultural indepen-
    dence” (Barry 2009, 189).
    During this same period, the Scots-Irish Ellen Glasgow began writ-
    ing what are now considered feminist novels. Anticipating later French and
    American feminists, her novels The Romance of a Plain Man (1909) and The
    Miller of Old Church (1911) imply that women should begin writing their
    2. In turn the fi ctional doctor refl ects the feelings of Gilman’s real doctor, S.
    Weir Mitchell. See Nancy Cervetti’s biography, S. Weir Mitchell, 1829–1914: Phila-
    delphia’s Literary Physician .
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    own stories and thus challenge patriarchal traditions. In Virginia (1913), her
    most successful work, she argues that a woman must search for and estab-
    lish her own identity. Her 1922 novel, One Man in His Time , suggests that
    females reject the notion of being a “womanly woman” and focus on devel-
    oping friendships with one another, while Barren Ground (1925) implies
    that self-denial is not a necessary part of a romantic relationship. Further
    anticipating twenty-fi rst-century gender theory, Glasgow asserted that gen-
    der roles should be socially constructed. She expanded on these issues in
    “Some Literary Woman Myths” (1928) when she attacked the “subservient”
    role of women vis-à-vis their male colleagues in the publishing world. In
    1938, she incorporated some parts of this essay into her novel She Stooped to
    Folly , noting at one point that the derogatory view men took of women could
    be traced to the Garden of Eden (Matthews 1995).
    Glasgow’s